With the 2014 cycling season fast approaching, everyone is dreaming about their upcoming events and setting new goals. There is only one way to reach those goals: training. There are no shortcuts. You must push yourself physically, but don’t limit your training to the bike. You also need to get your mind ready for the season ahead. Part of this is accomplished alongside the simple task of fitting training into your life: scheduling training time, keeping to your diet, monitoring your sleep, and spending time on work and family all require the power to focus, and you can use that in an event.

Channel Anxious Energy
You might feel nervous before a competition. The key is controlling that nervous energy so it can be productive. Feeling nervous shows that you care about the event and the result—that’s good. But feeling so nervous that you’re afraid and anxious is negative and can adversely affect performance. Excess anxiety causes muscle tension, increases stress levels, and reduces focus. Some signs of trouble are problems sleeping, feeling on edge, or being totally quiet and withdrawn. Athletes can battle against this unproductive emotion using meditation, breathing techniques, and visualization.

See Yourself Achieve
I admit I never practiced meditation, but I did find visualization very helpful. It involves using all your senses to provide a clear mental image of your performance. It’s important to focus not only on the end goal but also on the steps toward the goal. Visualization can be done with internal imagery (first-person view, or how the activity looks to you) or external imagery (third-person view, or how it would look if you were the spectator). In both perspectives the goal is to clearly watch yourself perform the activity. With mental imagery you want to go through the emotions, control the performance, see the technique, the breathing, the competitors, and visualize the outcome that you desire. It’s a process that should be done three times a week for about 10 minutes each session. This will not only allow you to produce an image of the result but will also help motivate you to train and obtain the result.

Motivate by Mantra
In competition, positive reinforcement will help you push yourself harder, so it’s important to learn to connect the pain of competition with a positive emotion, not a negative one. Know that the pain is temporary and remind yourself that you did it during training and that you can repeat the process in competition. Focus on immediate, even extremely short-term goals. Get through the next minute, to a certain mile marker, or to the top of a hill, and don’t let yourself feel overwhelmed by thinking of the whole event at once. Try to always stay in the present. Having a mantra is also useful. When I was suffering in the mountains during a race, trying to stay with a group, I would repeat phrases to overcome the pain: “Come on, you can do this, a little longer, don’t stop”—anything to keep me in the position that I wanted to stay in. And when I’d get hungry during races or training, a song would pop into my head: “Hunger Strike” by Temple of the Dog. This of course didn’t help anything, but it reminded me it was time to fuel up.

Some riders need races to get fit. They just can’t duplicate the intensity of training by themselves, even with fast friends. Other riders have the motivation to train hard enough on their own to get race ready. Former Olympic gold medalist and world champion Hennie Kuiper used say, “You have to train harder then you race.” It’s hard to do physically, and even tougher mentally. But if you train hard, channel your nervous energy positively, visualize your success, and stay motivated, the power of your mind will help you accomplish your goals.